Symposium notes progress in cleaning up Utah Lake

OREM — The applause continued for several minutes at the end of what many people called the best Utah Lake Symposium yet.

About 100 people spent up to seven hours recently at Utah Valley University listening to speakers discuss dealing with phragmites, removing carp, restoring lower Hobble Creek and managing the Utah Lake Bridge proposal.

Collectively, the presenters examined almost all aspects of the lake's ecosystem, said Sam Rushforth, dean of UVU's College of Science and Health. It was the largest turnout the symposium has had in the past five years, he said.

Rushforth, who has been studying the lake for 30 years now, said he will take away three things from the symposium: The news about Utah Lake is good and getting better; the community must work together to protect it; and the lake is not as polluted or dirty as many people think.

"The lake is resilient," Rushforth said, "and as we treat it with more care, it will rebound. We could see a different Utah Lake in a few years."

Reed Harris, one of the speakers at the symposium and director of the June Sucker Recovery Implementation Program, spoke directly about how the lake is becoming cleaner. The program has removed 300,000 pounds of carp since Sept. 21, Harris said. Officials hope to remove up to 1 million pounds with the grant money received, and then 5 million pounds with additional grant money from the federal government.

Harris said the carp are destroying vegetation and causing the June sucker fish to die more readily. He is hoping that with the removal of the carp, the lake will become cleaner, there will be more aquatic plant life and the June sucker will be removed from the endangered species list.

Dave Grierson with the Utah Division of Forestry, Fire and State Lands talked about the several-step process the Utah Lake Bridge proposal is going through, while Mark Heileson of the Sierra Club presented drawbacks to implementing the bridge plan.

The keynote speaker this year was Michael Donahue, former director of the Great Lakes. Donahue emphasized the importance and history of having a watershed approach, meaning not worrying about city or state lines but having communities that share the same drainage basin work together to do what's best for the bodies of water near them.

He went through 10 steps of advice for how to make organizations that deal with bodies of water even better. Some of those included celebrating successes and not always taking the "sky is falling" approach; educating and involving the public; establishing benchmarks to gauge success; and securing financial long-term health.

The step Donahue said is most important, though, is making sure organizations dealing with bodies of water are adaptable and not just focused on the immediate issues but the future as well.

e-mail: slenz@desnews.com